The Arsenal of Inclusion and Exclusion

Recent books like Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City celebrate the capacity of cities to bring people together to hook up, swap ideas, and influence and inspire each-other, but it’s important to remember that our cities are pretty good at keeping people apart, too. More than forty years have passed since the Fair Housing Act outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, and marketing of homes, in mortgage lending, and in zoning, and still most Americans live in communities that are racially, economically, generationally, and even politically and religiously segregated.

How can we explain this? What produces segregation? Is racial segregation merely the legacy of policies and practices—like racial zoning or racial and religious covenants—that the Fair Housing Act rendered illegal? Or are there newer, subtler things that continue to produce racially homogeneous communities?

This map — and the forthcoming book that it appears in — is meant to support that latter claim. Hidden in the map are forty commonly-used, contemporary “weapons” in what we call the “Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion,” a collection of policies and practices that are used by architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, neighborhood associations, and individuals to wage the ongoing war between integration and segregation, between NIMBY (not in my back yard), and WIMBY (welcome in my back yard).

“The arsenal of exclusion and inclusion” is a preview of the forthcoming book of the same title, to be published by Actar later this year.

1. Animal Zoning Ordinance
Animals have a right to the city too! But most zoning ordinances prohibit animals of the farm variety, declaring them “inharmonious.” Inspired in part by the urban agriculture movement, new animal-friendly zoning ordinances such as the one passed by the Cleveland City Council in January, 2009 seek to overturn these restrictions. / Theresa Schwarz

2. Annexation / Incorporation
While some cities in the southwest still annex territory, most of the American cities of the midwest and northeast have not expanded much further beyond their 1900s limits (New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis haven’t added territory since the nineteenth century). As Kenneth Jackson illustrates in Crabgrass Frontier, a combination of new laws that made incorporation easy and annexation unworkable, improved suburban services, a rising anti-urbanism that came to see the cities like New York as too big, foreign, and ungovernable, and an ensuing desire for home-rule effectively boxed big cities in. Without tax-revenue sharing, small municipalities – who still relied on the big cities for working, shopping, transportation, and entertainment–depleted the cities’ tax bases, and created the city / suburb divide that still plagues cities today.

3. Armrest
To deter the homeless from sleeping on park benches, decorative armrests are sometimes installed at the midpoint of the benches, making it impossible (or at least very difficult) to get too comfortable on them.

4. Badge
The use of beach tags to restrict access to beaches proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s in suburban municipalities in the densely populated northeastern corridor. Wealthy municipalities along Connecticut’s Gold Coast adopted some of the more extreme measures of exclusion, allocating beach access permits to residents only, installing guarded gates at points of entry, and aggressively patrolling beaches for violators. / Andrew Kahrl

5. Blood
After Hurricane Katrina, the Council President of St. Bernard Parish introduced an ordinance mandating that owners of single-family homes that had not been rentals prior to Hurricane Katrina could only rent said single-family homes to blood relatives. As 93 percent of St. Bernard Parish’s housing stock was owned by whites at the time of the storm, the target of the ordinance was pretty clear.

6. CC&Rs
Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) are rules governing land use in private communities. Typically drafted by a Homeowners’ Association, CC&Rs attempt to guard the property value of homes in the community by regulating everything from paint colors to landscape materials to lawn ornaments. CC&Rs are often classist: CC&Rs have restricted aluminum siding, barbecue grills, lawn ornaments, basketball hoops, and even American flags. In his book Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government, Evan McKenzie writes of a family in a private development outside Philadelphia that was forced to remove a swing set because it was made of metal and not, as the CC&Rs stipulated, wood.

7. Concierge
The Concierge is essential to the “tourist bubble:” a package of amenities that are designed to lull in and entertain the tourist while steering him or her away from unexpected encounters with poverty, crime, or decay. Tell a concierge in the downtown of an American city that you are new in town and need some sight-seeing recommendations, and they are likely to point you towards the same safe, tourist-friendly, Chamber of Commerce-certified establishments.

8. Cul de Sac
A cul de sac is a “closed-end street,” which produces closure and discontinuity. Another name for the cul de sac is “dead end.” Interestingly, in 2009, Virginia became the first state to ban (or at least seriously limit) culs-de-sac from future developments.

9. Curfew
Teen curfews are arbitrary and legally-murky. Teen Curfews can be less arbitrary—for example when Baltimore in 2011 announced a teen curfew in response to a rash of teen stabbings—but many teen curfews represent an unlawful imposition of martial law. In early 2010, San Diego overturned its curfew law due to ambiguous language, and Indianapolis recently overturned its curfew laws when it determined that they forcefully undermine adolescents’ first amendment rights. Nonetheless, teen curfews are common in cities and suburbs around the country.

10. Eruv
Eruv is a Hebrew term for a symbolic boundary, defined according to Jewish religious property law, which allows Jews to conduct activities on the Sabbath (the traditional day of rest) within a broader urban area that would otherwise be prohibited outside of the home. In the contemporary city this boundary is typically built by stringing wire between the tops of existing utility poles, forming an uninterrupted yet nearly invisible enclosure of “doorframes” (wire between two poles) that allows the “wall” of the eruv to be maintained. The eruv is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it allows practicing Jews who might otherwise be required to segregate themselves to enjoy the benefits of living within a larger urban area while satisfying the traditional requirements of religious property law. / Michael Kubo

11. Exclusionary Amenity
An exclusionary amenity is a collective good that is paid for by all members of a community because willingness to pay for that good is an effective proxy for other desired membership characteristics. If the community wants to exclude a particular group, and members of that targeted group are systematically unlikely to want to pay for a polarizing and costly amenity, then the exclusionary amenity may function as an effective mechanism for denying access. / Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Visible in this drawing are seven communities that use exclusionary amenities to create homogeneous, segregated communities:

11a) PGA Village
As Strahilevitz points out in his essay for the forthcoming book The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, a golf course is another type of “exclusionary amenity.” Strahilevitz writes that during the 1980s and 1990s, as African Americans began moving to the suburbs in growing numbers, the number of “mandatory membership” residential golf communities in the United States grew significantly. At the time, golf was the most racially segregated warm weather, mass-participation sport in America. (In 1997, 93.4 percent of all American golfers were Caucasian while just 3.1 percent were African American.) Might developers have discovered a method for creating racially-homogeneous communities?

11b) Ave Maria
Ave Maria is a master-planned, Catholic-themed town just northeast of Naples, Florida. Developed by Domino’s Pizza founder and Roman Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan, Ave Maria puts Catholicism at the center of community life, a fact that is evidenced by the 100 foot tall, neo-Gothic oratory in the main square. Through the Ave Maria Foundation, Monaghan also controls a new Catholic university, Ave Maria University, which has over 600 students and is planned to accommodate up to 5,000.

11c) Snowflake
Snowflake is an “Environmental Isolation” community in Arizona, where a group of people with debilitating sensitivities to certain chemicals live in about thirty homes on large, widely-spaced lots. Snowflake offers isolation and neutrality to individuals who would otherwise suffer from exposure to life-threatening ailments and diseases. Have an aversion to common house paints and solvents? Snowflake’s rigid product guidelines include a provision that banns them. Originally founded by two Mormons (last names: “Snow” and “Flake”), the community offers privacy and isolation for people unable to healthfully exist in other, more chemically saturated, areas.

11d) Rainbow Vision
Rainbow Vision, a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender) retirement community near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Santa Fe, New Mexico, provides a familiar array of resort and retirement community amenities to a demographic underserved by planned communities. (The untapped market has been highly successful as three more branches are soon opening in the Bay Area and Palm Springs, California, and Vancouver, Canada.) Whether providing assisted-living services to the elderly, or offering Wednesday night drag shows in the community center, the development offers an inclusive array of activities and properties for those attracted to a GLBT-centric environment. Even heterosexual homebuyers have been attracted to the spa, dancing, and nightlife that the community offers.

11e) Sky Village
The residents of Arizona’s Sky Village, a planned community at the foot of the Chiricahua Mountains, use their homes to indulge a passion for the night sky. Amateur astronomers, stargazers, and outdoor buffs alike find solace in this low-light, sparsely electrified community of time-share haciendas. Far from any significant city and located in one of America’s darkest regions, denizens of Sky Village enjoy night-time hikes, evenings gazing through their personal telescope, or cocktail parties with fellow astro-geeks.

11f) Jumbolair
That’s not thunder you hear overhead: that’s a 707 Jetliner approaching Jumbolair’s 7,550 foot runway in time for dinner at one of the development’s 29 contiguous estates. While the commute from this Ocala, Florida community might be measured in nautical miles, everything else resembles the private glitz of a gated neighborhood, from the gated entryway to its formal dining hall. Originally a 380 acre horse farm, Jumbolair was first licensed in 1984 as a fly-in community, one of several across the nation, but the only one with private taxi-ways for its jet-lagged residents.

11g) Peace Village
Peace Village, a 265-home suburban subdivision outside Toronto, looks like a typical North American suburb, until one notices that its streets and culs de sac are dedicated to prominent Muslim thinkers. In fact Peace Village was built for members of Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect that fled Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s to avoid religious persecution. The subdivision has unassumingly given these Muslims refuge, as well as license to live according to their conventions within a modern, Western city. A mosque built into the subdivision dominates the skyline, prayer speakers (mounted on poles in the parking lot) call residents to prayer each morning, and in the homes, dual sitting rooms separate men and women at social gatherings and heavy-duty ventilation equipment attenuates the strong odor of Middle Eastern cooking in each kitchen.

12. Fire Hydrant
Much of Duxbury, MA’s coast is blocked by large private residences. In the eighteenth century, the Town established a series of public landings allowing waterfront access at streets dead-ending at the water. Today, however, fire hydrants are often placed directly in front of the only parking spot available at public landings, excluding anyone who comes from outside the neighborhood and needs to park to visit the waterfront. / Meredith TenHoor and William TenHoor

13. Fire Zone
In beach-front communities like New York City’s Rockaway, the streets that dead-end at the beach are sometimes declared “fire zones,” on which parking is prohibited (the houses on these streets all have driveways). In Rockaway, the ubiquity of fire zones–which are found on over twenty streets–suggest a non-safety related motivation, namely, keeping away non-residents who wish to access the beach.

14. Gate
The gates that guard gated communities offer one of the more obvious examples of how we keep out “undesirables.” Though statistically there is little evidence that gated communities are safer (or have higher home values) than non-gated communities, the perception that they are has led to more and more Americans living in them each year.

15. Hockey Rink
In 1994 the Division of Parks, Public Grounds & Recreation in the borough of Glen Rock, NJ, a wealthy, white, suburb of New York City with a population of 11,232, made a decision to replace two basketball courts in the town’s Wilde Memorial Park with a street hockey rink. Glen Rock—which is 88 percent White Non-Hispanic—borders Paterson, an older, poorer city that is 13 percent White Non-Hispanic. The decision raised eyebrows because the basketball courts were heavily used by African-Americans from Paterson. It is well known that hockey is played primarily by whites and basketball primarily by African-Americans: while 79 percent of NBA players are African-American, only 2 percent of NHL players are. Moreover hockey—like golf—is often criticized for being elitist: the equipment required to play it—skates, sticks, pads, goals—is expensive, and one typically needs a car to transport it.

16. Housing Voucher
The large-scale use of housing vouchers began in 1966, when Dorothy Gautreaux and 43,000 other Chicago public housing tenants sued the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for discrimination. This case eventually led to the Gautreaux Demonstration Project, where people were given vouchers to move from inner city public housing to private housing all over the Chicago metropolitan area, city and suburbs. Today, housing vouchers are among the most progressive weapons in the Arsenal of Inclusion, as they give the poor access to low-poverty communities with good access to jobs, education, and health. / Damon Rich

17. Immigrant Recruitment
In a bid to save itself from a shrinking population and economic base after General Electric Co. and other industries left the city, Schenectady, NY actively recruited Guyanese immigrants from Richmond Hill, Queens, a Borough of New York City. Starting with bus tours, the Mayor of Schenectady went to unusual lengths to attract new residents to dilapidated neighborhoods in his town of 62,000. Attracted by the availability of affordable housing, in a few years the Guyanese community in Schenectady swelled to 7,000, contributing to the local economy by opening shops and restaurants and reclaiming much of Schenectady’s housing stock. / Julie Behrens, Kaja Kühl

18. Inclusionary Zoning
Inclusionary Zoning or Inclusionary Housing requires developers to make a percentage of housing units in new residential developments available to low and moderate-income households. A major victory for inclusionary zoning took place in 1975 in Mount Laurel, NJ, where the Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. successfully argued that there is a constitutional obligation for municipalities to produce affordable housing. Eventually, this led to the Mount Laurel Doctrine, which continues to encourage the development of affordable housing in New Jersey.

19. Lavender-lining
Gays and lesbians have long conveyed queerness through the performance of personal style, but it was only after the birth of the modern gay rights movement that they began to openly delimit queer territory, using sexual orientation as a tool of inclusion to create communities that celebrated queerness, most famously in the Castro in San Francisco and in Northampton, Massachusetts, but also in lesser-known places such as Alapine, a lesbian-only community in rural Alabama. / Gabrielle Esperdy

20. Map
In 2007, The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a Los Angeles-based group that leads creative explorations of everyday habitats, made maps and led safaris that helped people “find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on a Malibu beach legally and safely.” Despite ubiquitous “private property” signs found up and down Malibu beaches, numerous easements and other “loopholes” exist that enable individuals to legally occupy them. The safaris include skills-enhancing activities like a public-private boundary hike, sign watching, a no-kill hunt for accessways, and a public easement potluck.

21. Minimum Lot Size
Minimum Lot Size regulations, typically found in municipal zoning codes, define the smallest lot size that a building can be built on. Suburban municipalities sometimes use minimum lot size regulations to exclude affordable housing, public housing, and the poor, for whom building on large lots is not possible. An early exclusionary use of Minimum Lot Size regulations can be found in New Caanan, CT, which in 1932 zoned 4,000 undeveloped acres “two-acre residential.”

22. “No Loitering” Sign
Loiterers have it tough. Consider the following, taken from the website ehow.com: “People who loiter will often do some type of damage to property, such as tagging buildings with graffiti or damaging concrete with skateboards. Loiterers are sometimes associated with the sale of illicit drugs. . . In short, loiterers almost always do some level of damage to your business, and rarely provide anything positive.” How do you keep loiterers away? The scourge of teenagers and homeless people everywhere, the “No Loitering” Sign is the most commonly-used weapon homeowners and businesses use to discourage people from hanging out outside their buildings.

23. No-Cruising Zone
Cruising, or driving a motor vehicle past a traffic control point more than twice within a designated period of time (usually about two hours), has been a staple social activity of Americans as long as cars have been symbols of social status. Many small towns have a route, or “strip,” that is an identified cruise zone, and have “cruising nights” when cars drive slowly, bumper-to-bumper through urban boulevards or small town centers. No-cruising zones is a weapon used by municipalities to block recreational driving, and ergo, this conglomeration of supposedly “anti-establishment” youth. In 1999, the ACLU Utah unsuccessfully tried to overturn Salt Lake City’s no-cruising zone, stating that it “seeks to criminalize lawful conduct” and “extends to innocuous behavior far removed from the problem it seeks to remedy.” Alas, Salt Lake City’s no-cruising zone remains in effect.

24. NORC SSP
NORC stands for “Naturally Occurring Retirement Community.” On the one hand, a NORC is just a building or neighborhood that wasn’t planned as a retirement facility, but that has a large elderly population. But NORC also refers to Social Service Providers (SSPs) that retroactively service such buildings or neighborhoods with the amenities—home health care, transportation, education, and entertainment—that are found in “purpose-built” retirement facilities. NORC is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it is a potential foil to the phenomenon of geriatric ghettoization, whereby senior citizens are segregated in isolated, purpose-built retirement communities.

25. One-Way Street
Greenmount Avenue between 33rd Street and Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore is an interesting wall. On the east side, 85% of residents are black, 16% have a Bachelor degree, and the median income is $40,000. On the west side, 96% of residents are white, 75% have a Bachelor degree, and the median income is $75,000. Such rapid shifts in demographics are common in Baltimore, but this stretch of Greenmount Avenue is interesting for the physical devices that one side deploys to maintain a disconnect from the other. For example, of the eight streets that intersect Greenmount Avenue between 33rd Street and Cold Spring Lane, only one (39th Street) allows travel from east to west. Six of the streets are one-way pointing east (i.e., out of the wealthy, white side), and one of the streets (34th Street) thwarts westward movement with bollards.

26. Questionnaire
In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop writes about how the developers of the Ladera Ranch, a planned community in Orange County, California, used a questionnaire to steer prospective home buyers into one of its lifestyle-themed developments. Thus for those who “see the Earth as a living system” there is “Terramor,” which features bamboo floors, and photovoltaic cells. Across the way, in a development called “Winners,” houses are more colonial than craftsman.

27. Racial Steering
Racial steering refers to the illegal practice whereby real estate brokers guide prospective homebuyers towards or away from certain neighborhoods based on their race. Racial steering is not a thing of the past: in 2006, Corcoran, one of New York City’s biggest real estate brokerage companies, made headlines when a sting operation by the National Fair Housing Alliance revealed that Corcoran brokers were drawing maps of Brooklyn that outlined neighborhoods that were “changing.” The maps—whose source was a Census map showing percent change in numbers of African-Americans—were used to show white families where they should consider living. The map was not shown to black families with similar financial qualifications.

28. Regional Contribution Agreement
If, under an inclusionary zoning provision, a developer is required to set aside a percentage of the units for affordable housing, the developer can in some states enter into an agreement with a separate municipality, and effectively pay it to build the units. These agreements are called Regional Contribution Agreements. They are dubious because forcing affordable housing away from wealthier housing discourages a mixture of areas and only serves to reinforce ghettoization. An example of Regional Contribution Agreements are New Jersey’s COAH laws, which were created in response to the state’s Mount Laurel decision (see “Inclusionary Zoning”).

29. Residential Parking Permit
Residential parking permits create restricted parking districts and exclude the larger public from specific areas. While Residential Parking Permits make sense in congested, residential areas next to universities, medical institutions, sports complexes or tourist attractions, they are often established and enforced in very low-traffic neighborhoods that have plenty of street parking available, especially wealthy ones that are next to poor ones.

30. School District
The stellar reputation of some public schools can segregate family households from non-family households, especially in urban areas. When a family is in a good district, the money mom and dad save not having to send Ella and Emma to private school is tacked on to the cost of housing. This in turn results in a self-sorting: people who don’t have kids find that it is not worth their while to live in the district, and opt (or are forced) to live somewhere else where rent is cheaper (and where they might find retail amenities less suited to the needs of young parents).

31. Sidewalk Management Plan
Portland’s sidewalk management plan, proposes a 6′ – 8′ “pedestrian use zone” in which pedestrians “must move immediately to accommodate the multiple users of the sidewalk.” Importantly, the zone measures out from the property line, ruling out leaning on (or sleeping on) buildings. Such a plan isn’t needed on the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan; what justifies one in relatively serene downtown Portland? Needless to say, this is a barely disguised attempt to rid downtown Portland of homeless people.

32. Skywalk
Skywalks are elevated bridges that create interior connections between adjacent buildings. Many cold-weather cities have extensive skywalk systems: Calgary has one that is ten miles long. In Minneapolis, which boasts the largest continuous skywalk system in the United States, skywalks span 8 miles and connect 69 blocks of the city’s downtown. While the appeal of skywalks is obvious to anyone who has visited places like Calgary and Minneapolis in the Winter, the fact that skywalks can be privately owned and controlled appealed to other, less frost-bitten cities, who used them to build a secondary, access-restricted circulation system that avoided confrontation with the elements of the public sidewalk below.

33. Ultrasonic Noise
“Is your business suffering from anti social youths driving your customers away? Are you bothered by crowds of teenagers hanging around your street or business and making life unpleasant?” These questions come from the website of “kids be gone,” the exclusive North American importer for the Mosquito Kid Deterrent Device, a small box that emits, as the name suggests, a high frequency sound that only teenagers can hear (persons over 20 typically can’t hear high frequencies in the range of 18 to 20 kHz). The company’s website brags that the Mosquito has been successfully used in railway stations, shops, and, of course, shopping malls.

Interboro Partners is a New York City-based office of architects, urban designers, and planners led by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore. Interboro has won many awards for its innovative projects, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the AIA New York Chapter’s New Practices Award, and the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices and Young Architects Awards.www.interboropartners.net